Understanding professional boundaries and social media.

Guidance for Professional Use of Social Media in Nutrition and Dietetics Practice

Background: In recent times, health professionals have used their personal or professional social media (SM) accounts to disseminate health information through SM platforms. This study explores the factors influencing physical therapists' (PTs) intentions to share health-related information on social media (SM) platforms in Kuwait, addressing a significant gap in the literature. Methods: The study utilizes the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) framework to examine the impact of performance expectancy (PE), effort expectancy (EE), social influence (SI), and facilitating conditions (FCs) on PTs' intentions. A survey was conducted with PTs, and data were analyzed using linear regression to identify significant predictors of intention. One-way ANOVA was also used to examine the effects of demographic factors. Results: The results indicate that FCs, EE, and PE significantly predict PTs' intentions to share health information on SM, accounting for 47% of the variance in intentions. Specifically, FCs had the highest impact (β = .347, p = .002), followed by EE (β = .284, p = .003) and PE (β = .193, p = .048). SI did not significantly influence PTs' intentions (β = .054, p = .581). Demographic factors such as age and years of work experience did not significantly affect intentions. Conclusion: This research provides valuable insights into the factors driving PTs' intentions to share health information on SM. Future research should explore additional variables such as trust, attitudes, and financial incentives, and extend the model to other SM platforms and larger, more diverse populations. Understanding these factors can help in developing strategies to enhance the use of SM for public health communication.

Navigating Social Media in #Ophthalmology

Social media have grown exponentially in the United States over the past 15 years. Despite its widespread use in plastic surgery, the role of social media within plastic surgery training programs has yet to be well defined.1,2 Therefore, the purpose of our study was to determine the prevalence, purpose, and ethical principles guiding social media use in plastic surgery training programs within the United States. A survey questionnaire was designed using Research Electronic Data Capture software (REDCap; developer, Vanderbilt University). The survey included questions about participant and program demographics and detailed questions regarding social media use. The survey was emailed to 135 program directors and division chiefs, as well as 88 program coordinators. The program coordinators were asked to distribute the survey to residents at their respective programs. Completed responses were recorded and analyzed. Forty-five faculty responded, resulting in a 33 percent response rate for the faculty group. An additional 30 responses were received from the trainee group. Sixty-seven percent of the faculty responses were from program directors and 33 percent were from division chiefs. Eighty percent of the trainee responses were from integrated residents and the remaining 20 percent were from independent residents. Seventy-six percent of programs reported having an official social media account, similar to results obtained by Azoury et al.3 Instagram appeared to be the most popular platform in our study, with 85 percent of programs using it (Fig. 1). The most common reasons for social media use were branding (77 percent), education (74 percent), and residency recruitment (66 percent). Our study found that the majority of social media accounts were managed by residents (65 percent) (Fig. 2).Fig. 1.: Social media platforms used by plastic surgery training programs compared to those used by plastic surgery trainees for personal use.Fig. 2.: The composition of personnel directly managing professional plastic surgery program social media accounts.Sixty-nine percent of faculty reported social media increased the reach of the program to potential applicants. This is likely due to increasing number of applicants using online resources to find information about training programs before submitting applications.4,5 Only 22 percent of programs reported using social media as a screening tool during the residency interview process. Of those programs that did, 70 percent reported it affected whether an applicant received an interview. Almost all plastic surgery trainees had at least one personal social media account (97 percent). Preferred platforms are shown in Figure 1. Only 19 percent of trainees currently had a separate professional account. However, 52 percent of trainees planned to have a professional social media account after completing training. Sixty-nine percent of faculty reported having guidelines for social media use at their university. Fifty-one percent reported not having formal training for residents and faculty. Breach of patient privacy was reported by 11 percent of programs and 31 percent had professionalism concerns. Only 58 percent of programs had reprimands in place for inappropriate use. Overall, our data suggest that social media use is common among plastic surgery training programs. The most popular social media platform appears to be Instagram. While many universities have guidelines to govern institutional social media use, the majority do not provide residents with formal training in this arena. Further studies should focus on the development of proper training modules for social media use by residency training programs and possibly governing societies. DISCLOSURE None of the authors has a financial interest in any of the products or devices mentioned in this article. Abhishek Jain, B.A.College of Medicine Daniel Crane, M.D.Sami Tarabishy, M.D.Division of Plastic Surgery Isis Scomacao, M.D.Fernando A. Herrera, M.D.College of Medicine and Division of Plastic SurgeryMedical University of South CarolinaCharleston, S.C.

Ethical standards for cardiothoracic surgeons' participation in social media

Abstract: This exploratory embedded case study examined the personal and professional social media use of entry-level student affairs professionals at four campuses from a state university system. Bounded by the profession of student affairs, this study focused on how entry-level student affairs professionals used social media platforms. Findings suggest that most entry-level professionals do not enter student affairs ready or willing to engage university communities on social media platforms and their respective campuses and graduate programs are not preparing them to do so. Study participants largely lacked a professional digital identity and were somewhat reticent about developing a robust professional digital identity. Contributing to their hesitancy, participants described their digital baggage – a collection of social media or social media-connected experiences that consciously or unconsciously influence personal or professional social media use.

In recent years, social media platforms have become key elements in many teachers' professional lives. In particular, teacher professional activities on X (formerly Twitter) have received attention from scholars. However, research has rarely explored X/Twitter use with attention to the diverse national contexts in which teachers work. To address this literature gap, this qualitative study collected data via individual and focus group interviews with teachers (N = 29) in three countries: England, Norway and the United States of America. Inductive analysis yielded findings related to purposes for, changes in and benefits and challenges of K‐12 teachers' X/Twitter use. Participants from all three contexts described professional learning activities that included sharing and/or acquiring knowledge and resources, and building professional networks and/or communities via X/Twitter. Multiple participants across contexts also referred to similar challenges such as avoiding negativity from other users. However, differences in X/Twitter use were also noted across teachers from the three national settings, such as only Norwegian participants speaking about using X/Twitter to find collaboration partners for teaching and learning projects. We discuss our findings in relation to literature, theory and practice around teacher professional learning in an era of widespread social media. Practitioner notesWhat is already known about this topic Many K‐12 teachers use X/Twitter and other social media platforms for professional learning purposes. Teachers can use X/Twitter for various purposes and in multiple ways. Contextual factors influence teachers' use of X/Twitter. Social media platform use varies to some extent across cultures and nations. What this paper adds Identification of similarities and differences in X/Twitter use among teachers. International comparative analysis based on individual and focus group interviews of participants from England, Norway and the United States of America. Evidence related to the evolving and dynamic nature of teachers' use of X/Twitter. Implications for practice and/or policy Teachers who use social media may benefit from understanding diverse potential uses of platforms. Policies and guidance regarding K‐12 teacher social media use should accommodate various contextual factors, including national context. Diversity and changes in teacher professional social media use warrant more international comparative research in relation to wider policy contexts in education.

BackgroundSince its outbreak in January 2020, COVID-19 has quickly spread worldwide and has become a global pandemic. Social media platforms have been recognized as important tools for health-promoting practices in public health, and the use of social media is widespread among the public. However, little is known about the effects of social media use on health promotion during a pandemic such as COVID-19.ObjectiveIn this study, we aimed to explore the predictive role of social media use on public preventive behaviors in China during the COVID-19 pandemic and how disease knowledge and eHealth literacy moderated the relationship between social media use and preventive behaviors.MethodsA national web-based cross-sectional survey was conducted by a proportionate probability sampling among 802 Chinese internet users (“netizens”) in February 2020. Descriptive statistics, Pearson correlations, and hierarchical multiple regressions were employed to examine and explore the relationships among all the variables.ResultsAlmost half the 802 study participants were male (416, 51.9%), and the average age of the participants was 32.65 years. Most of the 802 participants had high education levels (624, 77.7%), had high income >¥5000 (US $736.29) (525, 65.3%), were married (496, 61.8%), and were in good health (486, 60.6%). The average time of social media use was approximately 2 to 3 hours per day (mean 2.34 hours, SD 1.11), and the most frequently used media types were public social media (mean score 4.49/5, SD 0.78) and aggregated social media (mean score 4.07/5, SD 1.07). Social media use frequency (β=.20, P<.001) rather than time significantly predicted preventive behaviors for COVID-19. Respondents were also equipped with high levels of disease knowledge (mean score 8.15/10, SD 1.43) and eHealth literacy (mean score 3.79/5, SD 0.59). Disease knowledge (β=.11, P=.001) and eHealth literacy (β=.27, P<.001) were also significant predictors of preventive behaviors. Furthermore, eHealth literacy (P=.038) and disease knowledge (P=.03) positively moderated the relationship between social media use frequency and preventive behaviors, while eHealth literacy (β=.07) affected this relationship positively and disease knowledge (β=–.07) affected it negatively. Different social media types differed in predicting an individual’s preventive behaviors for COVID-19. Aggregated social media (β=.22, P<.001) was the best predictor, followed by public social media (β=.14, P<.001) and professional social media (β=.11, P=.002). However, official social media (β=.02, P=.597) was an insignificant predictor.ConclusionsSocial media is an effective tool to promote behaviors to prevent COVID-19 among the public. Health literacy is essential for promotion of individual health and influences the extent to which the public engages in preventive behaviors during a pandemic. Our results not only enrich the theoretical paradigm of public health management and health communication but also have practical implications in pandemic control for China and other countries.

Using Digital Media to Promote Kidney Disease Education

The use of social media among surgeons is increasing in the professional domain as a result of the benefits of rapid communication for advertising, professional development, advocacy, and innovation. Social media allows for collaboration and consultation on cases that may be difficult or uncommon, drawing on collective wisdom but also bypassing traditional privacy protections and other regulatory firewalls. The expanded access that comes with social media produces challenges, including the management of information dissemination and ensuing perceptions, the risk of biased patient/research participant recruitment, the potential for overlap between personal and professional lives, and the precarious nature of self-interest in professional social media use. The ethics of surgical innovation in the context of social media has not been extensively discussed. The nature of social media favors attention grabbing, sensationalized content. Innovation is inherently sensational and demands attention. The alignment of these intrinsic characteristics forms a basis for its appeal and contagion on social media. Despite strict regulatory clinical research environment, many surgical innovations and subsequent evolution in practice arise from a longitudinal surgical culture of trial and error that happens every day. The difficulty in distinguishing innovation from research and the precarious nature of interactions found on social media create a unique ethical dilemma to be addressed for the innovative surgeon. Therefore, the use of social media in surgical innovation thus requires a more robust ethical analysis.

Purpose: Overwhelmed by the huge rise in the number of social media (SM) platforms, B to B firms have been increasingly using multiple social media (SM) platforms to enhance their relationships with their customers. The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of the competitive pressure to use SM on B to B firms use of multiple SM platforms, organization and individual SM competences and on relationship sales performance. Method: An online survey is implemented to collect data from B to B firms from different industries in an emerging market, i.e. Kuwait, to produce 152 usable questionnaires. Structural equation modeling is carried out using Smart PLS 3. Findings: The main findings show that competitive pressure to use SM fully influences relationship sales performance through individual social media competence. It also influences relationship sales performance through two mediations (1) organizational SM competence, (2) on a less important level, through the use of multiple SM platforms and organizational SM competence. Additionally, both organization and individual SM competence are found to significantly influence relationship sales performance. Implications: This study uncovers the complex mechanism through which competitive pressures to use social media influence both individual and organization social media competence and their relationship with their customers. It demonstrates that the use of multiple SM platforms significantly increases relationship sales performance, but this influence is weak. Therefore, top managers must choose the right number of SM platforms and design clear SM strategies. Originality: This study sheds light on the influence of competitive pressure to use SM on B to B firms’ relationships with their customers i.e. relationship sales performance. This coercive pressure could potentially spread B to B firms’ resources over a large number of SM and lead to poor SM presence. The study also emphasizes the role of top management in choosing the optimal combination of SM platforms and developing their organization SM competence.

Stem cell science should be tweeted.

Engagement in social media is increasing. Medical professionals have been adapting LinkedIn, a professional networking site, and Twitter, a microblogging service, for a number of uses. This development has been described for a number of medical specialties, but there remains a paucity of European data. A study was undertaken to measure the engagement and activity of German visceral surgeons on social media platforms. Visceral surgeons were identified from 15 regional Associations of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians (Kassenärztliche Vereinigungen) opt-in registers. A manual search was subsequently performed across key professional social media platforms. The presence of a profile and key markers of use were recorded. In total, 575 visceral surgeons were identified. 523 (93%) were men. 183 (31%) surgeons engaged in professional social media. 22 (3.8%) used Twitter, producing a mean of 16.43 tweets with a mean of 7.57 followers. 137 (24%) surgeons had a profile on LinkedIn with a mean of 46.36 connections. Female surgeons were less connected on LinkedIn (P<0.005). 60 (10%) used Xing, with a mean of 27.95 connections. There were no significant differences in use of social media between surgeons from Eastern and Western Germany (P=0.262) or male and female surgeons (P=0.399). German visceral surgeons are less engaged and less active on social media than previously examined cohorts. Loco-regional, cultural, demographic and regulatory matters may have a significant influence on uptake. If this surgical cohort wishes to have a wider international presence then education on the potential benefits of these tools may be needed.

Lists and Social MediaLists have long been an ordering mechanism for computer-mediated social interaction. While far from being the first such mechanism, blogrolls offered an opportunity for bloggers to provide a list of their peers; the present generation of social media environments similarly provide lists of friends and followers. Where blogrolls and other earlier lists may have been user-generated, the social media lists of today are more likely to have been produced by the platforms themselves, and are of intrinsic value to the platform providers at least as much as to the users themselves; both Facebook and Twitter have highlighted the importance of their respective “social graphs” (their databases of user connections) as fundamental elements of their fledgling business models. This represents what Mejias describes as “nodocentrism,” which “renders all human interaction in terms of network dynamics (not just any network, but a digital network with a profit-driven infrastructure).”The communicative content of social media spaces is also frequently rendered in the form of lists. Famously, blogs are defined in the first place by their reverse-chronological listing of posts (Walker Rettberg), but the same is true for current social media platforms: Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms are inherently centred around an infinite, constantly updated and extended list of posts made by individual users and their connections.The concept of the list implies a certain degree of order, and the orderliness of content lists as provided through the latest generation of centralised social media platforms has also led to the development of more comprehensive and powerful, commercial as well as scholarly, research approaches to the study of social media. Using the example of Twitter, this article discusses the challenges of such “big data” research as it draws on the content lists provided by proprietary social media platforms.Twitter Archives for ResearchTwitter is a particularly useful source of social media data: using the Twitter API (the Application Programming Interface, which provides structured access to communication data in standardised formats) it is possible, with a little effort and sufficient technical resources, for researchers to gather very large archives of public tweets concerned with a particular topic, theme or event. Essentially, the API delivers very long lists of hundreds, thousands, or millions of tweets, and metadata about those tweets; such data can then be sliced, diced and visualised in a wide range of ways, in order to understand the dynamics of social media communication. Such research is frequently oriented around pre-existing research questions, but is typically conducted at unprecedented scale. The projects of media and communication researchers such as Papacharissi and de Fatima Oliveira, Wood and Baughman, or Lotan, et al.—to name just a handful of recent examples—rely fundamentally on Twitter datasets which now routinely comprise millions of tweets and associated metadata, collected according to a wide range of criteria. What is common to all such cases, however, is the need to make new methodological choices in the processing and analysis of such large datasets on mediated social interaction.Our own work is broadly concerned with understanding the role of social media in the contemporary media ecology, with a focus on the formation and dynamics of interest- and issues-based publics. We have mined and analysed large archives of Twitter data to understand contemporary crisis communication (Bruns et al), the role of social media in elections (Burgess and Bruns), and the nature of contemporary audience engagement with television entertainment and news media (Harrington, Highfield, and Bruns). Using a custom installation of the open source Twitter archiving tool yourTwapperkeeper, we capture and archive all the available tweets (and their associated metadata) containing a specified keyword (like “Olympics” or “dubstep”), name (Gillard, Bieber, Obama) or hashtag (#ausvotes, #royalwedding, #qldfloods). In their simplest form, such Twitter archives are commonly stored as delimited (e.g. comma- or tab-separated) text files, with each of the following values in a separate column: text: contents of the tweet itself, in 140 characters or less to_user_id: numerical ID of the tweet recipient (for @replies) from_user: screen name of the tweet sender id: numerical ID of the tweet itself from_user_id: numerical ID of the tweet sender iso_language_code: code (e.g. en, de, fr, ...) of the sender’s default language source: client software used to tweet (e.g. Web, Tweetdeck, ...) profile_image_url: URL of the tweet sender’s profile picture geo_type: format of the sender’s geographical coordinates geo_coordinates_0: first element of the geographical coordinates geo_coordinates_1: second element of the geographical coordinates created_at: tweet timestamp in human-readable format time: tweet timestamp as a numerical Unix timestampIn order to process the data, we typically run a number of our own scripts (written in the programming language Gawk) which manipulate or filter the records in various ways, and apply a series of temporal, qualitative and categorical metrics to the data, enabling us to discern patterns of activity over time, as well as to identify topics and themes, key actors, and the relations among them; in some circumstances we may also undertake further processes of filtering and close textual analysis of the content of the tweets. Network analysis (of the relationships among actors in a discussion; or among key themes) is undertaken using the open source application Gephi. While a detailed methodological discussion is beyond the scope of this article, further details and examples of our methods and tools for data analysis and visualisation, including copies of our Gawk scripts, are available on our comprehensive project website, Mapping Online Publics.In this article, we reflect on the technical, epistemological and political challenges of such uses of large-scale Twitter archives within media and communication studies research, positioning this work in the context of the phenomenon that Lev Manovich has called “big social data.” In doing so, we recognise that our empirical work on Twitter is concerned with a complex research site that is itself shaped by a complex range of human and non-human actors, within a dynamic, indeed volatile media ecology (Fuller), and using data collection and analysis methods that are in themselves deeply embedded in this ecology. “Big Social Data”As Manovich’s term implies, the Big Data paradigm has recently arrived in media, communication and cultural studies—significantly later than it did in the hard sciences, in more traditionally computational branches of social science, and perhaps even in the first wave of digital humanities research (which largely applied computational methods to pre-existing, historical “big data” corpora)—and this shift has been provoked in large part by the dramatic quantitative growth and apparently increased cultural importance of social media—hence, “big social data.” As Manovich puts it: For the first time, we can follow [the] imaginations, opinions, ideas, and feelings of hundreds of millions of people. We can see the images and the videos they create and comment on, monitor the conversations they are engaged in, read their blog posts and tweets, navigate their maps, listen to their track lists, and follow their trajectories in physical space. (Manovich 461) This moment has arrived in media, communication and cultural studies because of the increased scale of social media participation and the textual traces that this participation leaves behind—allowing researchers, equipped with digital tools and methods, to “study social and cultural processes and dynamics in new ways” (Manovich 461). However, and crucially for our purposes in this article, many of these scholarly possibilities would remain latent if it were not for the widespread availability of Open APIs for social software (including social media) platforms. APIs are technical specifications of how one software application should access another, thereby allowing the embedding or cross-publishing of social content across Websites (so that your tweets can appear in your Facebook timeline, for example), or allowing third-party developers to build additional applications on social media platforms (like the Twitter user ranking service Klout), while also allowing platform owners to impose de facto regulation on such third-party uses via the same code. While platform providers do not necessarily have scholarship in mind, the data access affordances of APIs are also available for research purposes. As Manovich notes, until very recently almost all truly “big data” approaches to social media research had been undertaken by computer scientists (464). But as part of a broader “computational turn” in the digital humanities (Berry), and because of the increased availability to non-specialists of data access and analysis tools, media, communication and cultural studies scholars are beginning to catch up. Many of the new, large-scale research projects examining the societal uses and impacts of social media—including our own—which have been initiated by various media, communication, and cultural studies research leaders around the world have begun their work by taking stock of, and often substantially extending through new development, the range of available tools and methods for data analysis. The research infrastructure developed by such projects, therefore, now reflects their own disciplinary backgrounds at least as much as it does the fundamental principles of computer science. In turn, such new and often experimental tools and methods necessarily also provoke new epistemological and methodological challenges. The Twitter API and Twitter ArchivesThe Open

Beware: Patients increasingly purchasing medications via social media